Cryonics Essays (1599 words) - Emerging Technologies, Cryobiology

Cryonics is the low-temperature preservations of legally dead humans or pets with the hope that resuscitation in the future is possible. Fewer than 200 people have undergone the procedure since it was first proposed. This future resuscitation is aimed towards technology that can restore one to life, youth and health. Cryonicists are people who use or advocate cryonics in the hope of extending their life and youth once they have passed. The purpose of cryonics is to save the lives of living people, not inter the bodies of dead people. Through preserving sufficient cell structure and chemistry so that recover (including recovery of memory and personality) remains possible by foreseeable technology. Death is a neurological process that begins after the heart stops. A stopped heart only causes death if nothing is done when the heart stops. Cryonics proposes to do something. The purpose of cryonics is to save lives of the living people not dead people. Legally, in the United States, cryonics can only be applied to a person who has been pronounced dead by a health professional. No law allows freedom of choice in this matter. The usual point of judgment in determining death is by cessation of the heart. However, almost all cells of the body are generally still alive when death is pronounced. The main damage is always within the first hour after the heart stops. It usually takes many hours for all cells to die at room temperature, including those in the brain. Cryonicists, however, do not want to wait hours, days or weeks before attempting to slow tissue deterioration due to tissue damaging. Cooling should begin immediately after the pronouncement of death. If so, tissue deterioration is minimized dramatically. Although cryonics preserves people at very low temperatures, it does not mean that cryonics patients have been frozen. Actual freezing involves the formation of ice, causing the crystals to be very damaging to the bodys tissues. Cryonics replaces the bodys water with an anti-freeze mixture called cryoprotectants. By injecting this biologic anti-freeze substance through blood vessels, most of the bodys water can be removed and replaced with this mixture. At very low temperatures ranging from -200F/-130c the cryoprotectants harden like glass, without forming the damaging crystals, and creating parts more plastic like. This process is known as Vitrification. Vitrification can preserve organs as large as the human brain, maintaining excellent structural preservation without the hazards of freezing. The ideas of cryonics involve the proposal that people can be frozen and stored for periods of hundreds of years. Freezing it not a treatment for disease; but merely opens the possibility of future treatment to a patient. A close consideration of the kinds of disease from which we now suffer, and from which we will in future suffer, strongly suggest that freezing would yield very little real benefit to the frozen if we are only willing to contemplate freezing for short times of 20 years of so. Indeed, if we start to freeze people with the intent of doing so only for 28 years, we will be led to storing them for hundreds of years. The basic premise involves an uncertainty which no amount of purely technological discovers will removes at this time, even if someone is successfully frozen. According to experts, there is no evidence that cryonics can work and is often regarded with skepticism. Cryonics is an interdisciplinary field based on three facts from diverse unrelated sciences and based off of theoretical future technologies. These three facts are: cells and organisms need not operate continuously to remain alive. Many living things can successfully be cryopreserved and revived. Secondly, existing cryopreservation techniques, while not yet reversible, can preserve the fine structure of the brain with remarkable fidelity. This is especially true for cryopreservation by vitrification. The observations of the first fact make clear that survival of structure, not function, determines survival of the organism. And last, it is now possible to foresee specific future technologies that will one day be able to diagnose and treat injuries right down to the molecular level. Without all these facts, cryonics seems ridiculous. Cryonics is definitely not guaranteed, and can fa il in two ways. Either cryonics patients will not remain cryopreserved long